AFTER THE TERROR: A BOOK AND
FURTHER THOUGHTSTed Honderich
This is a further
revision as of 9 December of a paper that was given around
11 September 2002 at Columbia University and the New School University
in New York, Brown University in Providence, and the University
of Toronto. It is derived from the new book After the Terror.
It is a summary of much of the book but not all. It also
has in it some new reflections, including some that should be in
the book about the secondary subject of Palestine and the right of the
Palestinians to their terrorism. It is good to report, since what is
said is not popular, and exercised some newspapers in Canada, one of
which by a threat then got Oxfam Great Britain not to take
£5,000 in royalties from the book as a donation, that
the four academic occasions went at least decently in their
different ways, those at Columbia and Brown being particularly
enlightening to me. The final version of this paper appears in The
Journal of Ethics, 7:2 (2003).1. GREAT GOODSThere are things that all of us desire, great goods.We all desire to go on existing, where that is not a
lot more than being conscious. We want a world to exist in a way, which
literally may be what it is to be perceptually conscious. We have the
same desire for those close to us, our children first. This desire can
sometimes be defeated by others. It comes to mind that a lot of
American men and women would have ended their own worlds, carried out
suicide missions, to prevent the 3,000 deaths on September 11.
Nonetheless, this existence is something almost all of us crave.1A second desire is for a quality of life in a certain
sense. This is a kind of consciousness that has a lot to do with our
bodies. We want not to be in pain, to have the satisfactions of food,
drink, shelter, safety, sleep, maybe sex. As that implies, and as is
also the case with
the first desire, we also want the material means to the end in
question,
this bodily quality of life. Some of the means are some of the
consumer-goods, so-called, easier to be superior about if you have them.A third thing we all want, no less, is freedom and
power. We do not want to be coerced by personal circumstances arranged
by
others, bullied, subjected to compulsion, unable to run our own lives,
weakened, humiliated. We want this voluntariness and strength in a
range of settings, from a house, neighbourhoods and places of work to
the greatest setting,
a homeland. It is no oddity that freedom from something is what is
promised by every political tradition or movement without exception --
and secured to some extent if or when it is in control. It is also
promised by every
national tradition.Another of our shared desires is for goods of
relationship to those around us. We want kinds of connections with
these other people. Each of us wants the unique loyalty and if possible
the love of one other person, maybe two or three. We also want to be
members of larger groups. No one wants to be cut off by his or her own
feelings from the surrounding society or cut off from it by others'
feelings. This was a large part of why it was no good being a nigger or
a Jew in places where those words were spoken as they were.A fifth desire, not far away, is for respect and
self-respect. No one is untouched by disdain, even stupid disdain. No
one wants to feel worthless. As in the case of all these desires, this
one for respect and self-respect extends to people close to us, and in
ways to other people, and it goes with desires for the means to the
ends. If the generalization that we all want respect and self-respect
requires qualification, it remains about as robust as generalizations
about human beings can be.Finally, we want the goods of culture. All of us want
at least some of them. Many of us want the practice and reassurance of
a religion, or the custom of a people. All of us with a glimmer of
knowledge want the good of knowledge and thus of education. All with a
glimmer of what is written down want to be able to read. We also want
diversion if
not art.This is no simple taxonomy of satisfaction or
well-being. Certainly several of the desires shade into one another.
There is room
for decision rather than discovery as to where to locate a particular
real-life desire -- something you had this morning, since desires are
of course
several-sided. Other kinds of questions can be raised about the
taxonomy,
more than are answered in the book2 from which this paper
mainly
comes, but I think they can be answered. It will do as an account of
our
shared and fundamental human desires. It is by its nature an account of certain reasons
for actions, policies, practices and the like. That an action satisfies
someone's desire to go on existing, or for a bodily quality of life
that
is decent, or for freedom and power where they have lived in their own
memory and that of their parents and grandparents -- these are reasons
for an action or whatever. So too is an action's satisfying someone's
desire
to get over a threshold with respect to each of the other three great
goods
a reason for it. We may call all these six reasons first-order reasons.
They are of course general, like all reasons. They are also of very
great weight. That does not imply that they cannot be misused, or that
one of them cannot be overcome by another such reason or conceivably by
a lot of reasons of some other sort.In connection with first-order reasons, and large
questions that arise by way of them, let us turn our attention to
lives.
Let us turn our attention to bad lives in particular but also good
lives. A bad life, we take it, is to be defined in terms
of the frustration of some or all of these desires for great goods. A
good life is defined in terms of satisfaction of them. Other grades of
life would be defined similarly. Uncertainty about such a question as
whether a good life must have in it the goods of culture show this is
partly a matter of decision. But it is not only that. Let us approach
the matter by way of the
world itself.2. BAD LIVES, GOOD LIVESTake the nine countries of United States, Canada,
the United Kingdom, France, Germany, Italy, Spain, Denmark and Japan.
Compare them with the four African countries of Malawi, Mozambique,
Sierra
Leone and Zambia. The individuals in the first group of countries, our
group, have life-expectancies or average lifetimes of about 78 years.
Those
in the second group live for an average of 40 years. That means that many individuals in the second group,
those who pull the average down to 40, have what with reason can be
called half-lives at best.This is only partly owed to a certain fact, but it is
a fact that needs attention for itself. In the United States and like
countries, for every 1,000 live births, the number of children who die
under
the age of five years is about five or six. The number of dyings for
the
second group is about 200.The proximate or immediate explanation of this
difference, and the full lives as against the half-lives, and of other
things to be mentioned, is material means to well-being. We in our
group of countries have means worth an average of $24,000 a year. The
individuals in the African countries have means worth an average of
$220 a year.Compare the economically best-off tenth of population
in our group of countries with the worst-off tenth of population in the
four African countries. The average lifetimes in our best-off tenth are
about 80 years. The individuals in the worst-off tenth in the other
group
live for an average of about 30 years. So most of those in the latter tenth who bring the
average down to 30 have what can reasonably be called quarter-lives at
best.Consider the individuals in the worst-off African
tenth, and the question of whether their average lifetimes might have
been increased. You could keep in mind that in part of the 20th
Century,
the life-expectancy of American whites increased by about five years a
decade. That happened, so to speak, without trying. If we in our
countries
had made a deliberate and real effort to help the four African peoples,
would those Africans now alive in their worst-off tenth live an average
of 15 years longer? 10? Probably 7? Say only 5. There are about 10,000,000 individuals in the
worst-off tenth. So there is a loss of 20,000,000 years of living-time.
Losing living-time is not the same as being killed. No one makes that
mistake about the loss. No one needs to make it in order to reflect on
the magnitude of it.In thinking after September 11 of our part in the
story, if any, and of other things, it seems to me that the first and
largest subject must be our omissions, be they right or wrong. We have
omitted to help those who die early. However, there are also our
positive
acts, so-called, our commissions, a less tractable subject, certainly
less
tractable when treated briefly. Or rather, since the distinction is not
simple and commissions shade into omissions, there is the side or end
of
the whole range of our actions considered in terms of conscious
intentionality
-- the side or end that consists of commissions. Here is one case, now the most salient one, a case
where it is not possible to leave open the question of right or wrong
even for a while.In 1900, within something close to living memory,
there were about 500,000 Arabs and 50,000 Jews in Palestine.3
Many of the latter had arrived recently on account of the barbarism of
anti-Semitism. The subsequent horror of the mass murder of European
Jews
in the Second World War did not issue, as in justice it ought to have,
in
a protected Jewish state carved out of Germany. After the war, according to a United Nations
resolution, Palestine
was to be divided into two states. There were about 749,000 Arabs and
9,250
Jews in what would be the Arab state. There were 497,000 Arabs and
498,000
Jews in what would be the Jewish state. It was a moral necessity, in my
morality,
that a Jewish state be founded somewhere. Given things as they were,
that
it be maintained as and where it was founded, partly by way of Zionist
terrorism,
and certainly to the detriment of the Palestinians, was also such a
necessity. There has since been no Palestinian state but rather
50 years of obstruction and the rapacious occupation of more and more
land by Israel, importantly aided by a distinction between official or
state killing on the one hand and non-official killing on the other
hand. Most Arabs have been driven out of their homes. In the years 1989
to 1991, there were between 250,000 and 400,000 Jews settled on Arab
land. Of about 7,000,000 Palestinians, about half are now outside of
Palestine. All this history, and the actions by Israel and its
army after September 11, have been importantly owed to the policies and
actions of the United States in particular. The resolutions of the
United Nations against Israel, unlike other resolutions, have come to
nothing
principally because of the United States.These accounts of deprivation by omission and by
commission, our parts in Africa and Palestine, give rise to large
questions. Our present concern, however, you may remember, was to be
the general understanding and defining of bad lives and good lives.But let us not struggle with the matter, say, of
whether a life can be bad in virtue of being frustrated just in terms
of the good of culture. Let us rather resolve, if that is the right
verb, that those with half-lives, dying children, those with
quarter-lives, those who lose 20,000,000 years of living-time -- that
these individuals do have bad lives. It is worth noticing in passing,
in connection with the nature of morality and moral judgements, that
this judgement seems to be both indisputable, a matter of fact, and yet
presumably in the old category of value-judgements. So too, we can take it, do the Palestinians have bad
lives, first because of being denied the great good of freedom and
power in a homeland.3. THE PRINCIPLE OF HUMANITYHow ought we to think of various questions -- of
whether or to what extent we have done wrong over decades, of the wrong
of September 11, of moral responsibility for it, of terrorism more
generally, of our response in Afghanistan and thereafter, and of what
to do now? With what morality should we think of these matters? If you have well in mind such facts as those at which
we have glanced, you may come to a certain principle of right action.It is not well-expressed, indeed expressed at all, as
the truistic principle that we should rescue those with bad lives. It
is the principle that we should actually take rational steps to the end
of
getting them over the line into good lives. That is, we should take
steps that are not pieces of pretence or self-deception or
politicians'speechifying, but steps that actually secure the end. In
being rational, they will also have to be economical in terms of
well-being, of course -- be effective
but not cause more distress than they prevent.The principle, again, is that the right thing as
distinct from others -- the right action, practice, institution,
government, society or actually-possible world -- is the one that
according to the best judgement and information is the rational one
with respect to the end of saving
people from bad lives.The end, by the way, is not a relational one, not
the end of getting everybody on a level, making everybody the same. It
is, as stated, the end of saving people from bad lives. It would demand
action on your part in a world where everyone had equally bad lives. So
it is a principle of humanity, fellow-feeling or generosity rather than
of equality, despite certain weaker reasons for the latter name.The Principle of Humanity can be further understood by
way of at least four policies to be followed to reduce the number of
bad lives. The first policy is to transfer certain means to
well-being from the better-off to the badly-off -- means whose transfer
would in
fact not significantly affect the well-being of the better-off. An
immense
amount of these exists. Think about what we waste, or just about
packaging.The second policy is means-transfer that that would
reduce the well-being of the better-off, without giving them bad lives.
An immense amount of these means exist. As in the case of the first
policy, some consist in land, and land of a people.The third policy, of great importance, is about
material incentive-rewards. It would reduce them to those that are
actually necessary, and actually necessary in terms of the goal of the
Principle of Humanity. They will not be the rewards now demanded. They will not be those that issue in the worst-off
tenth of Americans having 1.8% of the income or consumption and, on the
other hand, the best-off tenth having 30.5%. Or the bottom four-tenths
taken together having 0.2% of the wealth -- not 2% but 0.2% -- and the
top tenth 71%. The bottom tenth almost certainly has negative wealth.The fourth policy, implicit in the others, is against
violence and near-violence. Like all such policies called realistic, it
is not absolute or completely general. It accommodates some possibility
of justified war and other such action. Also the need for police
forces,
some self-defence, and so on. It gives a limited role to the
distinction
between official and non-official killing.4. PROPOSITIONSThe Principle of Humanity and the facts of bad lives
can lead us to contemplate or consider certain propositions having to
do with September 11 and with our past, present and future. Or rather,
September 11 can prompt us, by way of the Principle of Humanity, to
think of our
own moral situation and then, properly and necessarily, of all of that
situation, not only what is most relevant to September 11, not only
some
of the bad lives. You get a true sense of anything, including September
11 and its immediate explanation, only by knowing the rest of the story.Let me state all of the propositions and not just
some of them without veiling, euphemism and cant, which common things
pervade most writing on the matters in question and almost all the
stuff of our politicians. Obscuring conventions that stand in the way
of or are put in the way of
thinking are no part of the Principle of Humanity.(1) We have done overwhelming wrong, and continue
to do overwhelming wrong, in failing to help those Africans and others
whose lives are cut short. This wrong by omission is is as clear and
indubitable as that of the positive action of an airforce commander who
for reasons of international politics stops food from getting through
to the starving. Our wrong is as clear and indubitable too as sexually
abusing a child.(2) To be on an airliner and look around and see the
people and be able to stick to the plan of flying it into a skyscraper
is to do hideous wrong. To persist if they come to know that plan is to
do
monstrous wrong. Nothing can be thought that will take away from such
judgements
of wrong, from what seem to be moral data, whatever more needs to be
said.
Nothing will take away from the judgements, whatever needs to be said
of
something else, which is moral responsibility for September 11.(3) The wrong we have done and continue to do by
omission, with respect to Africa in particular, is most important for
itself and
for ensuing rights and obligations. However, it was also a necessary
context for the horrors of September 11. The horrors, despite their
particular
connection with the grievance of Palestine and also those of Saudi
Arabia
and Iraq, would not have happened save for the context. No such
proposition
is demonstrable, but this one is at least probable. To see that it is,
think of the world in which ours parts in Palestine, Saudi Arabia and
Iraq
were lapses, rare and momentary, from an exemplary moral record. So for
September 11 there are lines of moral responsibility into the past, as
real
as chains of command. We are in them with the killers, our leaders
ahead
of us. We need to escape the illusion that to be ordinary is to be
innocent.(4) Our counter-attack in Afghanistan after September
11 was to an extent humanly inevitable. It is to an extent excused from
judgement by the proposition that to say we ought to have refrained
implies we could have. To the extent that the counter-attack was not
necessary,
only something conditional can be said. The counter-attack was right if
it was accompanied by self-realization with respect to our omissions
and
our own share of responsibility for September 11, and also
self-realization
with respect to other things. It will take more time to tell.(5) The invasion and occupation of Palestine by
Israel, beyond its pre-1967 borders, is a moral crime. This too can
seem to be
a datum. So can what follows immediately from it, about the redress of
the Palestinians. In their terrorism, their only possible means of
redress,
the Palestinians do have what Israel claims exclusively on its own
behalf
in its state-terrorism and perhaps war, which is a moral right -- a
moral
right to killing. 4 For our part, our support of the
violation
of Palestine contributed most to our share of responsibility for
September
11. It is something else about which we need self-realization.(6) What is to be done with respect to our omissions
and commissions is first to try to change our own societies, our merely
hierarchic democracies and our vicious economic systems -- and our
leaders whose existence and sense of moral possibility is bound up with
them. This we can attempt to do by mass civil disobedience. It is now
the only possibility, and it has had successes in American and other
history. In the end it helped to bring down a wall of the Russian
empire.5. ALTERNATIVES TO THE PRINCIPLE OF HUMANITYWhat you have heard so far is not idiosyncratic or
eccentric, not news from nowhere. By the only factual test in this
matter, that of counting heads, it is not radical or outrageous.
Something very like
it has the support of a majority of those who live on this earth. It
has
greater support, however inexplicit, than the morals of any major
government or indeed people, or all of us in political and economic
systems and ways of life so fundamental to the short or brief lifetimes
elsewhere of which you have heard. That heuristic point about majority support is worth
making, but of course truth is no simple matter of numbers of
supporters. Nor, I trust, although this is more complicated, is moral
decency. If moral decency were just a matter of numbers, this would be
an embarrassment to each of the globe's large minorities with which we
are most familiar, say the members of centrist and in fact self-serving
political parties, to which the Labour Party in Britain has lately
added itself.Let us glance at a few things that can be said for the
morality of humanity, its policies, and the propositions on September
11 that may be contemplated as issuing from them. First some
comparisons with the Principle of Humanity.Liberalism is a morality in that it purports to answer
the question of how the great goods ought to be distributed and what
reasons there are for this. In its best formulation, by John Rawls, a
philosopher of good intentions, it remains vague. This may be its
essential nature. The vagueness is a matter of what it says and fails to
say of material incentive-rewards. Also uncertainty about traditional
liberties and their priority and sanctity. And, on account of both of
those uncertainties, a large uncertainty about a certain principle
having
to do with the badly-off, the Difference Principle. Of what effect is
this
principle of allowable inequalities? It is clear that on different
assumptions,
notably assumptions about demands made for incentive-rewards, the
principle
could sanction degrees of socio-economic inequality from none to
hitherto
unrealized amounts.The tradition of conservatism, and the special form of
it that is libertarianism, is like liberalism in pretty much consisting
in moralities for single societies. That is, however much these
traditions hold themselves up as examples, they concern themselves with
distributions of the great goods within one society. Robert Nozick's libertarianism actually has the
consequence that even starving people within its perfectly just society
can have no moral right to food.5 This is vicious, but let
us concern ourselves with something else -- something common to
liberalism, conservatism in all its forms, and also other things. It
may be an element in whatis called political realism or national
self-interest. It can also stand on its ownas a kind of morality. Let me speak, simply, of morality of relationship. It
brings with it a genus of which it is a species and from which it takes
support, this genus being morality of special obligation. To cut through the cackle quickly, morality of
relationship is exemplified by a woman who goes further in favouring
her child over
other children that some other mothers do -- say those with a feeling
for
the Principle of Humanity or for a certain clear Christian principle.
6 Her reason, she says, is that it is her child. Morality of
relationship is also exemplified by a reason that is given for being
taken up to a certain great extent with some people rather than others
-- the reason that they are of your own country or kind. This goes
beyond regarding relationship to those around us a great good, and goes
beyond the sustaining of this
relationshipAs for the wider morality of special obligation, this
large mixed bag includes general reasons of very many other sorts --
more or less the stuff of orthodox moral philosophy. These general
reasons
have to do with good intentions in actions, bad and good desert or
retributive justice as these things are usually understood, certain
rights of individuals and peoples, certain claims of recent or ancient
history, the positive
law of a land, international law, agreements made, and such values as
autonomy and integrity. All of these, along with reasons of
relationship, we may
call second-order reasons, without thereby begging any question.Morality of relationship, and all morality of special
obligation, has been contrasted with the Principle of Humanity and
related moralities. The latter are said to be consequentialisms,
moralities that take right things to be such only because they are the
ones with the best effects or consequences. Reasons of relationship and
other second-order reasons are said to be different in one way in
particular. To cut the cackle again, we may hear that the woman's
reason for favouring one child has at least a part that does not have
to do with effects or consequences of her action. Her reasons, to speak
differently, include at least one that does not have to do with
benefits
to the child or any other effects. It can be heard in her saying that
it
is her child.It seems to me that too much respect has been paid to
this sort of thing. This moral philosophy is at least in this one way
more than suspect. Its supposedly non-conhsequentialist nature calls
out for examination. It is useful to bring some philosophy of mind onto
the scene.
Very little may be enough.What is an action? It is a movement or stillness in a
way owed to a reason. A reason, as all agree, whether good or bad, is
something that contains a desire, maybe a desire for a great good,
something capable of being satisfied by some event or state of affairs.Leaving aside some unnecessary distinctions, surely we
now have an absurdity. As we have heard, some moral philosophy offers
us what it calls reasons for actions that have nothing to do with
effects of the actions. These reasons are things, therefore, such that
it makes
no sense to speak of satisfaction or frustration in connection with
them.
No effects and hence no satisfactions or frustrations are relevant to
them. In which case they are reasons that contain no desires.But reasons just are or just do include desires,
things capable of being satisfied by effects of actions. So the
conclusion has to be that in fact there are no reasons of the kind
officially recommended in the case of the mother and in the case of
your people rather than others. In general, there are no reasons of the
kind recommended in morality of relationship, as we are supposed to
understand it, and indeed in morality of special obligation generally.
Second-order reasons as officially understood are not reasons.Of course the mother's thinking, feeling or saying in
a certain way that it's my child does give a reason for action. It must
then be something else than is officially maintained by the moralists
of relationship. It must have to do with some event or state of affairs
that satisfies or could satisfy a desire of hers. It is obvious what it
is. It is no higher reason, as is supposed, or anything
deeper either. It is the desire that her child should have still more
than it would have if she were to favour her child to the extent
allowed
by the Principle of Humanity or a certain Christian principle. This is
yet more obvious in the other case, where one is a little less
distracted
by personal feeling -- the reason for a policy or whatever that people
it benefits are of your country or society.One conclusion of all this is that morality of
relationship is selfish. This conclusion need not beg the question by
circularly assuming something like the Principle of Humanity. The
conclusion will take into account, incidentally, that the woman's true
reason includes her own anticipated satisfaction in having done better
by her child. 6. THE UNDENIABILITY OF THE PRINCIPLE OF HUMANITYConsider something else into which these reflections
enter. It is something more fundamental and not even in part a moral
judgement or objection strictly speaking. It cannot be questioned or
put aside as having a basis only in such moral feelings as those
against selfishness. It is a natural basis of morality.Consider choices of a certain kind. All of them are
between (A) getting someone or some people or a whole people out of bad
life -- say bad lives as understood earlier -- and (B) improving the
already good lives of other people. Further, these choices are between
acting for first-order reasons, getting people into good lives in one
or more ways, and acting for second-order reasons -- relationship,
desert or whatever. Four examples come to mind.There is the choice, for example, between contributing
to saving people from quarter-lives, or the loss of 20,000,000 years of
living-time, and, on the other hand, further improving the situation of
other
people related to the possible contributors, maybe by being of the same
language or culture, but people already enjoying good lives. There is the choice between your contributing to
saving people from quarter-lives and, on the other hand, enabling other
people already in good lives to have more of the great goods for the
particular reason that they deserve more in terms of their own efforts
to put together a productive society. There is the choice, a version of one in sight
earlier, between starvation to death of children under five and the
tons of wasted food protected by the private-property rights of others.
There is the choice between your supporting a people
being denied freedom and power in their violated homeland and, on the
other hand, supporting another people so as to be on the side of
similar democrats or an ethnic group in your own society.Now consider yourself not a chooser but in one of
the groups with the bad lives. Further, consider yourself freed of the
absurd idea that that the reason for your not being helped is different
in kind from the satisfaction of desires. That is, consider yourself
free
of the idea that the reason for your not being helped is a higher or
deeper
reason, different in kind from your first-order reason for being
helped,
your reason having to do with the great goods. Rather, you believe that the reason for your not being
helped is others having the satisfaction of still more of the great
goods than they have already, and the agents in question having the
satisfaction of bringing this about.I trust it is true that everyone reading this, if
they themselves were among those with the bad lives in such a group,
would
give decisive weight to the first-order reason for being helped rather
than the second-order reason for improving other lives already good. In
short, each of us would take it to be right that we be helped. Reasons are of course by their nature general -- that
is the main fact about morality and much else of our lives. So you will
anticipate the next step. For you to take the given position in the
contemplated situation is for you to be committed to it in this actual
world in which you are among those with good lives -- an actual chooser
between such options as those mentioned a minute ago.If we do not help the deprived and violated, the
upshot is not only that we are in the wrong or selfish, which we are.
The upshot is that if we do not help those with bad lives we have no
reason for what we do instead. We put ourselves outside of humanity, by
which I here mean a reason-giving species. There are truths at the
bottom of morality. One, baldly stated, is that certain wrongful acts
are irrational in the sense of going against the applicable reasons,
those held by the very agents
in question. These agents, so to speak, are false to their own
humanity,
which here is to say their rationality or intelligence.No doubt things need to be admitted in qualification
of this argument for the undeniability of the Principle of Humanity,
this natural basis of morality. One is the admission that there are or may be people
like us, with good lives, who would not take it to be right that they
be saved from bad lives in the situations contemplated. So they may say
now, some without lying. It is hard to believe, but I cannot say it
troubles me greatly. It is not my intention to claim an iron law of
human nature. This basis of a properly naturalistic morality can rest
perfectly adequately on the proposition that by far the most of us are
in such a relation to the great goods that we would not be moved by
second-order reasons pertaining to others for our having bad lives.Something not to be respected has to do with the idea
that someone with a good life might carry a certain piece of theory or
ideology with them into their contemplation of being in a bad life --
and
so actually take it to be wrong that they be saved from the bad life.
The
theory would be to the effect that not improving the already good lives
would help the one person with a bad life but would on the whole result
in more bad lives. You will know the theory. The rich need to be richer
or there will be more poor.To my mind, if you will put up with some plain
speaking, there is a great lie and self-deception of this age, speaking
in particular of America and Britain. It is that any significant
reduction in the material means of the possessors of good lives would
necessarily damage further
the bad lives in these societies or outside of them. The proposition, I
take it, does not have such a probability as would detain anyone
of
ordinary altruism, sense and experience actually contemplating being
saved
from a bad life.The argument for the undeniability of the Principle of
Humanity is not new or unique. Rather, it has the recommendation of
great antecedents, the best-known of these being the Golden Rule. Among
its other antecedents is Immanuel Kant's categorical imperative having
to do with a maxim that can be willed to be a universal law, and the
clear
argumentation a couple of decades ago of R. M. Hare of Oxford, and no
doubt
that of John Rawls, and indeed the antecedent that is the feeling of
much
of the human race.What I have added, very briefly, is a consideration of
the great goods as against other things, and an attempt to clear away
some obscurity and confusion about the nature of morality of
relationship and special obligations in general. Whether or not the
obscurity and confusion has come about in order to save ourselves from
our own judgements -- that is a matter that can be left alone.Nor is it difficult for me to concede that some may
not go along with my account of the great goods. You may jib at my
account of our shared and fundamental desires. You may perhaps turn,
for example, to a list that can be derived from the Roman Catholic
tradition of Natural Law. There will of course be a congruence with
respect to the two lists. But the main point here is that any of a
number of factually arguable conceptions of great human good and bad
and lesser, and thus of associated great reasons over lesser reasons,
will generate an argument in terms of a fact of our natures and
consistency.7. THE PROPOSITIONS AGAINMore has now been said than can be reflected on or
defended, indeed more than is fully treated in the book from which this
paper comes. That is not the only possible disgrace in which a
philosopher can find himself. One way of avoiding moral philosophical challenges is
by glancing at the size of a reality and then, after a chorus of Nymphs
and Shepherds Come Away, turning to this or that mere bit or part of
the
reality supposed to be manageable on its own, something that can be
wrapped
up in a journal article. In fact, the bit must carry something larger
with
it, presume a view of the larger reality. To leave it alone and
unattended
to, and imply that it is in good shape, is also a philosophical
disgrace.
It is to depend on gesturing if not conjuring.You may ask how how what has been said hangs together,
indeed whether any necessity holds it together. You may ask how
judgements of moral data and first-order reasons go with or relate to
the Principle of Humanity and to the argument of undeniability for it,
and how the four policies having to do with means to well-being stand
to the Principle of Humanity itself. Could the principle not be argued
to issue in other policies? Well, not the intended principle. Rather,
despite being factual in part, the
policies give content to that principle. It, as distinct from any
related principle, is a commitment to the specified policies. But leave the other questions, as we must, and come to
the propositions on September 11, about wrongs, moral responsibilities,
and what is to be done now. It is my view, as you will anticipate, that
the propositions can be argued to follow on from the principle and the
policies, although of course with the aid of judgements of fact and
weighting. Anything that makes morality simpler is mistaken. Anything
that delivers moral conclusion is mistaken, probably pretence.You will gather that the first proposition, that we do
overwhelming wrong in failing to help those with the bad lives, must
depend on an argument that omissions with the same effects as terrible
commissions are as wrong. Given the standard or at any rate the most
common conception of the right action, and not necessarily that of the
Principle of Humanity, this conclusion seems inescapable. This most common conception of the right action is of
an action that is the rational one with respect to a certain
contemplated end on the best available judgment and information. The
rightness of an action is something clearly different from what is
persistently confused with it. That is an agent's kind or degree of
moral responsibility in the action, something into which honest mistake
or misjudgement and a good deal else can enter. It is essential to keep
clear that the right thing can be done for bad reasons, and the wrong
thing for good or tolerable or ordinary reasons.To come to the second proposition, the wrong done
on September 11 is untouched by the weak idea, having to do with our
wrongful omissions, that two wrongs make a right or that two wrongs go
somewhere towards making a right. Two wrongs do not make a right
because the second victim was the first perpetrator -- or because the
second victim invited that second wrong. The attack of September 11 was
wrong, rather, because there could be no certainty or significant
probability, no reasonable hope, that it would work to secure a
justifying end, but only a certainty that it would destroy lives
horribly.Some half-suppose or half-feel, differently, that
the wrong of the attack had to do with its being an attack on our
democracy. Some half-suppose what our politicians of democracy imply or
say, that
all of the six propositions are to be looked at and treated in terms of
the legitimacy that we have as democrats. This unique legitimacy makes
all
our actions, policies and the rest different from those of other
people.
Our official killing, our democratic killing, is uniquely different
from
non-official killing.Well, there certainly was a time when our democracy
had an indubitable decency owed to comparison with real things. Now, to
my mind, indeed to a majority of minds, it has an indecency compared
with possible things. It is hierarchic or oligarchic democracy. This
nature
can be demonstrated by the means of standing up above the ignorant and
managed consensus in which we are supposed to live our lives and
attending
to some tenths of income and wealth, say those American ones mentioned
earlier
in connection with material incentive-rewards.But our democracy's easily perceived nature as
hierarchic is not, relatively speaking, what overwhelms the idea that
it can and
does legitimate our actions. Something else does that overwhelming. It
is that hierarchic democracy, together with what is bound up with it,
our vicious economic system, is a fundamental and ineliminable part of
the explanation of a sample loss of 20,000,000 years of living-time.Our democracy and our economic system do not do well
at home, either, where we hear charity begins. I am 69 years old, and
have a hope of going on for a while. I suppose blacks in American
democracy
do too. Six years would make a difference. Black men in America have
lives shorter than white men, by an average of six years. There are
30,000,000 of them. Do we do things better in the democracy of England
and Wales?
Seven years is the difference between men of the fifth social class and
men of the first social class. There are quite a few men in the fifth
social
class.Some half-believe what our politicians of democracy
also imply or say, that you can deal with some of the six propositions
by depending on a word, 'terrorism'. They are right in one thing, which
is that the word can easily be defined plainly and uncontentiously.Terrorism, as can be elicited by starting from any
decent dictionary, has quite a number of features but fundamentally is
a
kind of violence, which is to say physical force that injures, damages,
violates or destroys people or things. It is this:violence with a political and social end, whether
or not intended to put people in general in fear, and necessarily
raising a question of its moral justification because it is violence --
either such violence as is against the law within a society or else
violence between states or societies, against what there is of
international law and smaller-scale than war.This definition might be enlarged in several ways. You
can try to give the content of the national and international law,
particularly in connection with the killing of innocents, civilians or
non-combatants. But there are various clear consequences of the
definition as it stands. (1) Obviously the definition cannot be offered, so to
speak, as a conclusive argument against the thing defined. Terrorism,
plainly, despite the question it all raises because of being violence,
is
not by definition wrong, all things considered. This is in accord with
the
fact that almost all who condemn terrorism have it in their
self-justified national histories. In particular, not all terrorism
used by peoples in seeking
freedom and power in their living-places is wrong.The definition is of
nothing
like the strength of the Principle of Humanity in argument against
terrorism
or condemnation of it. (2) As clearly, the definition includes
state-terrorism and cat's paw or proxy terrorism, of which there has
been far more in
history than of other terrorism. American history in particular
contains
a lot.(3) It is plain that terrorism, by the given
definition, can also be other things. It can be resistance. It can be
self-defence. It can be resistance to ethnic cleansing. It can be the
struggle of a people for their very survival as a people. To overlook
these manifest possibilities, all of which are open to clear
definition, is to fail again in moral intelligence. More particularly,
to overlook the facts that may make these descriptions plainly true is
to fail again in moral intelligence. If it must weaken
argument, on any side, to avoid the name and reality of terrorism, the
very same is true of these other things.(4) The plain and uncontentious definition of
terrorism also has the consequence that there cannot conceivably be a
simple moral comparison of terrorism with war. It is of course
inconceivable that war by plain definition is right. There have been
monstrous wars. All educated persons know it. It is clear that the ends
and the rationality of wars can be as different as the ends and
rationality of terrorism. (5) For an officer of a state, say a democratic state,
to proceed as if a very different and self-serving idea of terrorism is
just the plain and uncontentious definition is almost certainly lying.
It may be lying in the aid of killing, killing in the aid of taking
more land. Terrorism plainly defined is not only the terrorism of the
other side. The other side's terrorism does not necessarily justify
either your terrorism or your war. It does not justify your democracy's
terrorism or war. The pretences
to the contrary reiterated by the Israeli government changed and
hardened
my own thinking and feeling against it.To the fifth proposition then, of which there is much
to be said.7To claim a moral right to anything on anyone's behalf
is essentially to claim that it is permissible or obligatory for them
to have or do the thing, and that this very judgement has the support
of a fundamental moral principle -- a true one, as we may say. The
implication cannot be, obviously, just that there is a commonly
accepted or established moral principle, with nothing said of its
worth. No one has a moral right to something in virtue of a vicious
moral principle, however entrenched.
Claiming a moral right to something, then, does not go far beyond
saying
the thing is permissible or obligatory. To claim a moral right on behalf of the Palestinians
to their terrorism, as I do, is to say that it is permissible if not
obligatory for them to engage in it, which judgement has the support of
the Principle of Humanity as set out. If it supports hardly any
terrorism, it can be
taken to support this.The proposition of the Palestinians' moral right must
also rest, of course, on a good deal more. It rests on the history outlined earlier of the
rapacity of a state that quite quickly came to be secure in its
possession of overwhelming force, now including nuclear weapons of mass
destruction. The history
in terms of populations, the numbers of Jews and Palestinians at the
various times, overwhelms familar controversy about who did what in
what year in terms of massacres, wars, negotiations, supposed offers
and the like. The Palestinians are right to look back to Fascist
Germany and say they are
the Jews of the Jews.The proposition of moral right rests, further, on
accepting that the Palestinian people have no other means at all of
securing
their indubitable moral right to the great good of freedom and power in
their homeland and also other great goods. This seems to me to have
been
demonstrated by the 50 years of denial of that indubitable right,
including
intransigence in various negotiations conducted by America and
culminating
in what has been happening since September 11. That the past and
ever-greater
violation of the right of the Palestinians to their land gives rise to
their
right to their only possible means of redress can also seem to be a
moral
datum.The moral right of the Palestinians to their terrorism
also rests partly on something else as large. This is precisely the
claim of moral right by Israel in its state-terrorism and perhaps war.
It is to me unthinkable that the Palestinians could justly be denied by
their enemy exactly the moral right of a people secured and now being
enlarged upon
by that enemy. In connection with this requirement of consistency and
rationality, something needs to be remembered. A declaration of a moral
right to terrorism, like a declaration of a moral right to war, is an
action within a conflict. It is a part of a conflict, even if distant
from the scene
of action. Asserting such a right cannot be regarded as only an
abstract judgement, something only in the world of thought, something
in the thinking of a moralist, philosopher, commentator or the like.
The Israelis' declaration of their right to terrorism is a use of
morality in a conflict, a use of morality
that in consistency cannot conceivably be denied to their victims.It is to me beyond reasonable doubt, as you will have
gathered, that the state of Israel has in 2002 been engaging in
terrorism plainly understood against the Palestinians while justifying
itself to
the world by precisely a denial of that fact. The uncertainty and
vagueness of international law does nothing much to obscure the fact.
The fact of
state-terrorism, further, is entirely unaffected by the possibility
that
Israel may sometimes have been engaging in war against the Palestinian
people.
There was also terrorism, still taken as justified today, by two
subsequent
prime ministers of Israel, that was instrumental in the founding and
earlier
expansion of the state of Israel. There is another and more general requirement of
consistency and rationality. It is as fundamental to the support of the
proposition of the Palestinians' right that the history of mankind, as
remarked earlier, has importantly been a history of groups and nations
claiming a moral
right to terrorism and war -- the just war -- to secure or protect for
themselves the great good of freedom and power in a homeland. With
respect
to this consistency required by our humanity in the most basic sense,
there
did indeed occur what was known indeed as Britain's terror-bombing of
German
civilians in the Second World War. We did not take it to be wrong, but
right.To the Zionist policy of making distinctions between
the claims of the Palestinians and themselves with respect to moral
rights and whatever else, one reply is the request for a properly
articulated principle behind the distinctions. What is it? What
worked-out and half-arguable morality can be put in place of the
Principle of Humanity? Can there be anything that escapes at least the
taint of selfishness?A second reply to the making of distinctions is what
has been said already of the legitimacy claimed by us as democracies --
and what has been implied of the use of the distinction between
official and non-official killing. As well as analysis of the nature of
democracy and a consideration of the world of half-lives and
quarter-lives to which its omissions have contributed so greatly, there
is a good deal of useful history. There quite obviously have been and
are circumstances where moral legitimacy or authority is more possessed
by a group that is not a democracy or any kind of state. Too many
forget that Hitler was elected by a democracy.Do you still object to the definiteness of the fifth
proposition? Are you inclined to something in the direction of a moral
right of terrorism on the part of the Palestinians but subject to
qualification? To something other than a yes or no answer to the
question of rightness? There is a difficulty that needs to be pointed
out. We do not have a certain possibility, a kind of luxury. There are degrees of moral responsibility, and shares
of moral responsibility for things, and degrees of humanity or decency
in a whole life. But there are not degrees of being right or degrees of
being wrong. The question of which action is right is a question to
which
the only relevant response is a verdict. You do not have three possible
answers. Nor, common though it is to try, can the question be burked. Let me say, too, finally, and only a little
uncertainly, that surely there is inconsistency in granting a people a
moral right
to freedom and power in a homeland and then denying them a right to the
only possible means of getting it. In general it strains language and
sense
to accord a right to someone and forbid them the only effective means
of
getting it. If you purport to accord to the Palestinians a right to a
homeland,
and if you then deny them the only possible means, in effect you deny
them
the right to homeland. To accord them the one right is surely to accord
them the other. But I have been drawn away by Zionist and other
passions of this time8 from a still larger and darker fact,
our omissions as against this example of our commissions. In thinking about the main subject of our omissions,
like the lesser subject, it is possible to lose one's moral confidence.
It is particularly possible for a philosopher. We all have something of
what ought to be our very nature, I hope, which is a scepticsm
including self-doubt. Certainly we have doctrines that give little
place to factual truth in
morality. I admit to uncertainties, to an awareness of tensions if not
contradictions in what I have had to say, to weakness of moral will, to
doubts about my feelings. 9 But it comes together with
something
else. Indeed, it does not count for much as against something else.Does the wrong of flying the airplanes full of people
into the towers, doing that, with the further results, become uncertain
when I canvas my doubts? No, I am pleased to say, flying the airplanes
into the towers does not become only uncertainly wrong. And the
20,000,000
years of living-time lost? If I think, say, of the possibility of an
excess
of empathy on my part, does that loss become only uncertainly wrong?
Something
our leaders can qualify and explain? No, it does not become uncertainly
wrong.
That wrong is real and certain too. So too, I think, with the
Palestinians
and their moral right.Suppose you make it to one of those cocktail parties
that some dream about, with famous people at it. You are about to meet
the man who may still be spoken of by the International Herald Tribune
as Mr bin Laden, maybe back from the dead. You are also about to meet
Mr. Blair, who has just announced again that he and allies are about to
save the world. You shouldn't shake hands with Mr. bin Laden. You could
think about keeping your hand in your pocket with Mr Blair too.9 December 02NOTES1. This paper was read in New York, at Columbia
University and the New School, near the first anniversary of September
11. The occasions brought to mind the possibility that there are places
and times where,
even if there are two sides to a story, only one fills the heart and
should
do so. Maybe even places and times where only one side of a story does
and should fill the mind. This is clearer to me now than when the paper
was written. It was improved not only by the discussions at Columbia
and
the New School, but also by discussions at the University of Toronto,
Brown
University, Birkbeck College London, the universities of Oxford, Durham
and Edinburgh, and a meeting in the Conway Hall in London organized by
Philosophy
Now. With respect to the subject of perceptual consciousness as
existence,
touched on in passing, see "Consciousness as Existence, and the End of
Intentionality", in Anthony O'Hear, ed., Philosophy at the New
Millenium, Royal Institute of Philosophy Lectures for 2000-2001
(Cambridge University Press,
2001).2. After the Terror, Edinburgh University
Press, Columbia University Press, 2002.3. The figures and those below come from a source
neither Israeli or Western nor Islamic or Palestinian, The World
Guide
2001-2 (Oxford & Montevideo: New Internationalist Publications,
Instituto del Tercer Mundo).4. All terrorism, by a definition to be mentioned
below, is against law or what passes for law. Some of it, by a state,
is nonetheless what I am calling official -- terrorism by a democratic
state in particular. The other kind of official killing is war.5. A perfectly just society as conceived by Nozick is
one where everyone has a moral right only to what is his or her private
propertyas a result of mixing labour with things or subsequent
voluntary transfers. A starving child in this perfectly just society
may indeed have no right to food. 6. Is there an Islamic one, perhaps as overlaid by an
institution of religion? No doubt.7. All of it, I think, is at the very least implicit
in After the Terror. There has been no change of mind on my
part.8. I refer in particular to the matter of Oxfam Great
Britain. After accepting a donation of £5,000 of royalties from
the book After The Terror. Oxfam Great Britain subsequently
chose to decline the money as a result of a Canadian newspaper's
pressure having to do with my defence of the moral right of the
Palestinians. For my account of this matter, go to Oxfam GB, £5,000, Zionism, After the
Terror, and Medical Aid for Palestinians. 9. I have also been given pause, in different ways and
to different degrees, by philosophical and other books on or related to
terrorism: Noam Chomsky, 9-11 (Seven Stories Press, 2001), J. Angelo
Corlett,
Terrorism: A Philosophical Analysis (Kluwer, 2003), Trudy Govier, A
Delicate
Balance: What Philosophy Can Tell us About Terrorism (Westview, 2002),
Michael
Neumann, The Rule of Law (Ashgate 2002), Richard Norman, Ethics,
Killing
and War (Cambridge University Press, 1995), Rowan Williams, Writing in
the
Dust (Hodder & Stoughton, 2002)-------------------------------------------------------Have a look if you want at the first
chapter of After the Terror and also an interview about it
by Paul de Rooij, A Philosopher in
the Trenches .
For the matter mentioned in the introduction and footnote 8 go to Oxfam GB, £5,000, Zionism, After the
Terror, and Medical Aid for Palestinians.HOME to Ted Honderich front
page.HOME to Freedom and
Determinism Website